Saturday, 19 December 2015

The Design Museum will be moving to what used to be the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington soon. It's going to close in June 2016 and reopen about a year later. So Linda and I thought we would visit it while it is in its convenient location for us both. Not that we were helped by TfL's idiosyncratic Journey Planner, which suggested it was a 25 minute walk from London Bridge Station when actually you would have to dawdle to take more than 10 minutes.We began with their special exhibition entitled 'Cycle Revolution' which was very interesting though rather evangelical. An introductory film of many cycling notables said that the move to city life made cycling the best way to get about, and pointing out that in Copenhagen 45% of journeys to work are by clcyle compared to 5% in London. On the other hand, I don't think Copenhagen is full of HGVs and construction traffic inching through narrow roads.

The exhibition had a section about cargo bikes, including photos of a fine pram cycle and a stretcher from the Second World War, as well as the real things from early 20th century grocers' delivery to modern day carriers for goods or children.The walls were lined with cycles of all sorts, as well as accessories and what we took to be an air bag for a cyclist's skull. And there was a large section of folding bikes, from the first Bromptons and Bickertons to current more space age and convincing ones. Clearly with bike theft and bike storage being two of London's many problems, these are a part of the future.future.Next we came to a side-section about the bespoke cycle makers, with their snappy slogans and obsessive commitment to perfection. Some of these are women, some have witty names like 'Bespoked', but all have in common the wish to design the ideal bicycle. So it was worth having another look at the original Raleigh safety bicycle, from the 1880s to remind us that most design changes are really tweaking of the original shape and function.

We moved on then to a section called 'The Thrill Seekers' with film of BMX, mountain biking and (I think, though they were so covered in mud it was hard to tell) cyclo-cross.

The next section had to be about road racing and especially that British speciality, the Tour de France. Linda is not interested in cycling, so I was anyway very grateful for her tolerant willingness to visit the show. But now she had to put up with a lot of nerdy stuff about the need to put the team logo on the yellow jersey between the finnish and the podium, and why this one was not all sweaty.There were fascinating infographics (to me!) about the statistics of the race, the contents of the Sky Team cars and the contents of the musettes that feed the riders. Linda was interested to know that competitors could change bikes or, indeed, get off and push. The person who came last in the 2015 TdeF took 89 hours, 43 minutes and 13 seconds, five hours longer than Froome. And of the 198 who started, 160 finished/

We move on to look at track cycles, extraordinary gadgets with no gears and no brakes, anything to reduce the weight.

You can of course learn this arcane skill or simply watch while you have a cup of coffee, at the Olympic Velodrome.

Linda's patience having been tested, we headed downstairs, past a fine sculpture made of frames, and some road signs, including a mobius strip warning triangle, to reach the gallery where the winners of the Designs of the Year 2015 are displayed.

These are voted for and range from fashion items to buildings, with some strange and wonderful things in between. We noted that socially worthy items had tended to get the most votes, including a system for ridding the oceans of the plastic flotsam which occupies thousands of square miles. Also a programme that prints 3-D prosthetics in South Sudan and an excellent filtering and composting toilet for villages and camps with no running water.

Then there was a gadget to fix to your cows's tail so you know when she is going into labour.

And a wheel chair with the shock absorbers built into the wheels.

We paused briefly by hats, furniture, potential schools, new fonts and typefaces, and then spotted a new take on those dangerous immersion heaters for cups of coffee we used to have as students in the 60s (the 1960s, that is) This one menas you don't use a kettle, but rather a kettle base and whatever container you need to bring your water to the boil. we thought this rather clever, though we have not had much difficulty in only part-filling our kettles.

There was also a display by the designers in residence at the museum, but we were somewhat 'designed-out' by the time we reached them. There is a lot to see and we had a good time. We hope their move to Kensington goes well.

Wednesday, 16 December 2015

We should really stop going to
all the special exhibitions but it is difficult to avoid when the end dates
approach and time runs out. Talking of time – we badly misjudged our meeting
today standing effectively at opposite ends of the South Kensington tunnels so
were a bit later into the Museum than intended. Fortunately, this is an
exhibition with mainly large objects and the Museum had provided good clear
labelling which could be read from afar.

The V&A, as it’s often known,
is the UK’s premier arts and crafts museum housed in one of Albertopolis’s most
exuberant and fitting buildings. The substantive collection is arranged variously
by country, type (the sculpture galleries surrounding the central enclosed
garden, for example, but also ceramics, furniture, fashion etc) and era – the ‘Art
of the Renaissance’ and the most recently opened galleries ‘Europe 1700-1815’ which
brings together all the artefacts of particular movements. Past special
exhibitions have looked at themes such as ‘Gothic’. Photography is often
featured – Julia Margaret Cameron for one but we had seen her work very
recently down the road at the Science Museum!

Today it was the turn of the
textiles to shine as indeed some of them did.

which looked closely at the constituent elements of what goes into fabrics and the skills
needed to produce the wealth of colour and show that India – taken here in its
historic sense as a continent including the now separate or contested bits of
Pakistan and Bangla Desh and Kashmir. In this section each exhibit was
accompanied by a small map of the area of provenance and where possible a short
subtitled film showing the different skills and processes involved in the
largely hand-made production of different fabrics.

Naturally there was no
photography allowed so I have looked at the Indian fabrics I have at home and
tried to link them with the appropriate headings bearing in mind that what was
on display was old valuable heritage work whereas what I have is pretty
standard Indian handicrafts for tourism and export.

As what we associate most with
India is colour the exhibition starts with a clear exposition of where the
various natural dyes come from, including Indigo which needs no ‘fixer’ as long
as the cloth is fully submerged during the dying process. Indigo is a
derivative of India. Pomegranate skin,
rather surprisingly turns cloth a somewhat drab khaki (also a sub-continent
word) and you need the likes of beetles and other root plants to achieve a more
credible red colour. As the plants are not native to the UK you will need to
imagine them – turmeric being the easiest to find in your spice cupboard. Tying
cloth – ‘bandhani’ means to tie – will achieve
pattern and designs a lot more sophisticated then the Sixties 'tie-dye' we all
attempted.

Another way of putting different colours
together is to use a plain background and add applique cut-outs and there was a
beautiful example of elephants marching round a room on a wall hanging.

How the colours look and ‘take’
depends in turn on the fabrics used. Though
some wool is produced/used/worn in the cooler northern parts, India is most
known for its home grown cotton and silk,
and there were numerous examples of each. Muslin (as worn by Muslims, its
derivation) was also described as ‘woven wind’ so light is its texture and
anyone who has experienced the tropics will know how welcome the lighter
fabrics are to wear. Different species of silk worm produce different grades of
silk and there was clear film of the cocoons being steamed open and the silk
unravelled and spun.

Here is a short film which
explains but strangely I could only find 1920 film or ones showing Chinese
producers whereas this one is very English.

Once you have your basic fabric
the exhibition goes on to look at embellishment – this covers everything from
the subtle interweaving of gold or silver thread to embroidery (Gujerat being
the area for this), complex weaving to produce patterned cloth, or of course
printing.

The weaving of brocade produced
cloth of such magnificence it was no surprise to see it mainly used for holy
garments or wall hangings (the same is true in Europe if you think about it)
and there are magnificent examples of each. This includes a whole moveable tent
(when the rulers moved round their lands they took everything with them). Some
of these wall hangings include story-telling and there are skilled embroidered
or woven parts of the Mabaratha to instruct and entertain.

Equally there is no shortage of
‘princely garments’, those clothes worn by the ruling classes of course demonstrate
both power and wealth through the richness of the cloth and embellishment.

Printing on fabrics at its
simplest is not a costly process – again the method for this is carefully
explained – block printing starts with a hand carved wooden block which can be
re-used in different orientations and different colours to increasing
complexity and effect.

The second part of the exhibition
(special exhibitions in the V&A are arranged in some ground floor rooms but
there is always a hiatus when you cross the corridor then cross back?) looks at
fabric as part of the trade, industry and identity of the producing country.
There is evidence to show that Indian cottons have been traded for over 2000
years though few scraps survive. Wool lasts longer. India always exported much
cloth fabric to the UK until the Industrial Revolution when mass mechanisation
meant spinning, weaving and dying all happened on a more industrial scale so
that from the 1780s the UK exported cotton back to India where it eventually
became increasingly hard for the traditional hand-made and ‘cottage’ workshops
to compete with the industrialised factories so colonised India fell onto hard
times. Ghandi was a key figure in trying to reverse this trend and exemplified reclaiming
traditional garments (the Khadi in fine cotton) for the Indians.

Post-war the Bollywood industry
which showcases beautiful fabrics of all
kinds has been one of the ‘drivers’ for a renewed growth in the manufacturing
of fabrics, and there is a strong fashion industry also – we were less
interested in the various modern versions of the sari etc. but conceded they
were stylish. With the exception to the
references to Ghandi and his promotion of the Indian worker there seemed little space devoted to working conditions of the millions thus employed – working in the
cotton fields has never been easy and hand stitching tiny pearls or sequins
onto garments can cause eye and back strain… Nor do the poor working conditionsget much ‘wall space’. Having
said that, this exhibition does offer a good overview of the fabric that makes
up India past and present and does what the V&A does best – giving a
context for some of the world’s most beautiful objects. Having said that we
still have the rest of the museum to catch up with!!

Monday, 7 December 2015

After our incomplete visit two
weeks ago we returned to a (far less busy) Imperial war Museum to complete our
visit to the totally engrossing Lee
Miller: A Woman’s War, which today we had virtually to ourselves, allowing
us to savour each caption without feeling guilty. This is a sumptuous
exhibition which takes you from the hedonistic and self-indulgent Thirties
through the traumas of war and on to the rather austere post war
‘county/country’ England.

The Imperial war Museum has very
strong and impressive collections of art (not time today) photography and film
over and above the hardware items very evident in the galleries. Lee’s
photographs were of course taken on black and white celluloid film with a heavy
camera

My difficulty is of course that
photography was not allowed in the exhibition nor can I reproduce her photos on
the blog – however here is a linkto the official archive which has
a library of over 3000 images should you wish to browse at leisure or seek
something out. Her basic camera was a Rolleiflex (no light meter/ no zoom) and during
the war additionally a Zeiss-Ikon, both ironically German cameras. 12 frames
per roll of film. Contrast the discipline needed for that with our almost
incontinent use of multiple digital snaps. Good negatives will reproduce and
enlarge in good quality and there is no pixilation here.

Superficially her early life
appears settled – a mother who was a nurse, an employed father, two brothers.
However she was raped by a family friend at the age of eight and then had to be
treated for gonorrhea, not pleasant for a child in pre-anti-biotic days. Her
father introduced her to photography and took nude pictures of her. To say we
found this dubious is an understatement and had some speculation of the kind of
friends Mr Miller might have had… After this truncated or as we would say today
abusive childhood Lee left home early and was ‘discovered’ that is talent
spotted on the streets of New York by Vogue who then used her as a model for
the next two years. The combination of her stunning profile with beautiful Twenties
clothes is everything you might imagine. Lee then headed off to Europe and this
is where she got behind the camera more consistently and very creatively. In
Paris she joined a community of artists including Picasso and Man Ray, the
surrealist artist and photographer – Lee’s lover for a while and they developed
photographic techniques together. There and then she also met Roland Penrose
the English surrealist, and later life companion.

Rather in the style of the 'English Patient' film/book she
went to Cairo, Egypt where she met and married an Egyptian – this relationship
was of short duration and she returned/went to the UK to be re-united with
Penrose and stayed after the outbreak of war, although recalled to the US.

This is the point where the
exhibition really comes alive – Lee offers her services to UK Vogue and after
an initial rejection they let her take some photos of ‘suitable clothes and
hair for factories’! From 1941 her range expands – there are evacuees, ‘land
girls’ 'land girls' (yes it’s been a TV series too) the Women’s Home
Defence Corps, the Mechanised Transport Corps, the ATS. Lee was very thorough
and made sure she recorded women doing all kinds of war work including packing
parachutes. There is a wonderful shot of a Polish pilot, and WRNS in uniform.
The captions explain the roles the women would have played and their enormous if long-hidden
contribution to the war effort, while acknowledging the wonderful freedoms it
gave to many who were taught to drive, to work outside the home, and given the chance to travel. In
amongst these shots, Lee photographs probably World War II’s most famous female
war correspondent Martha Gellhorn and the lesser known Margaret Bourke White both US citizens like herself.

By 1944 she has persuaded US
Vogue to take her on as a war correspondent and her writing proved to be as
adept as her photography. From D-Day onwards she was but three weeks behind the
advances of the US troops into Normandy through France to Paris and on towards
Germany via Alsace. While she does record the fabric devastation of the
villages through which both armies fought her main focus remains the women and
children from both sides of the conflict – exhausted nurses and anaesthetists at
hospitals at the front (the survival rate was very good), later French female
collaborators shamed and blamed as the Allies advance. Nuns feature too and as
she heads towards Luxembourg there are shots of refugees digging for
dandelions.

Paris, which had been so spared
from bombing by mutual agreement, soon sprang back and the couture houses were
readily re-activated. There is an amusing shot of cyclists pedalling away in
order to generate enough electricity to work the hair dryers for a salon – two
stereotypes of French culture in one!

Initially Lee had been
attached/embedded with a particular Army corps but at some pint round St Malo
she went rogue and seemed to be working/travelling virtually alone. There is a
short video clip of a male colleague who remembers the pre-war fussy and
polished Vogue model completely transformed into a rough and ready photographer
who was completely at ease with GIs of all ranks.

From Leipzig she visits both
Dachau and Buchenwald and like all those liberators and camera men was deeply
affected by what she saw. Her anger is manifest when she arrives at Eva Braun
and Hitler’s Munich homes, full of home comforts denied to most of the rest of
Europe and where a carefully posed picture sees her using his bath leaving the
mud of the camps all over the mat… There is a display of the artefacts she
‘liberated’ from Eva’s dressing table – another woman’s very different war you
might say.

Post-war she was asked to stay on
by Vogue but not surprisingly after what she had witnessed in that year she
became depressed, something she medicated with cigarettes and alcohol. There
are very interesting documentary pictures of women in Hungary and Romania (a
country she and Penrose had travelled to pre-war and much loved), both a rich
Hungarian aristocrat bemoaning the damage to her castle and rural Romanian
workers scrabbling to feed their children. She hated Vienna where what she
termed the ‘madness of music’ seemed to mask their complicity and history.

In 1953 she leaves Vogue but has
a trip back to the US a year later. Her later life is spent with Roland
Penrose, whom she has married, in their Sussex farm house – the most surreal
(though not in the sense she would have understood it) is a picture of her in
apron cooking and carefully posed in her country kitchen for all the world like
an early Delia or Nigella. She died in 1977 leaving her son who now manages her
archive.

This is an absorbing and
compelling exhibition giving us both the best of photography and the best of
women – humanity – during conflict.

Thursday, 3 December 2015

Thursday 3 December 2015After our second visit to the fabulous Lee Miller photographs, about which Linda will write soon, we returned to have another look at 'Fighting Extremes', not least because we felt we had rather concentrated on the Ebola side of the room, rather than on Operation Shader. This small exhibition had been pushed into sharper focus by last night's vote in the House of Commons. One of the aims of Shader was to 'build partner capacity' and it seemed to us telling that there too, they were looking to the Kurds for help on the ground. What Turkey will say and do when, the conflict is over and the Syrian part of Kurdistan is successfully taken was not discussed last night. Presumably the Kurds will then move on to the third tranche of what they perceive to be their ancestral homeland, which is, of course, part of Turkey.There were some interesting exhibits, including a pair of army boots with the soles embellished with the names of the various towns where the extremists have been attacked.As with the Ebola side of the room, we were able to watch interesting videos of military and other personnel talking about their complex, overlapping and different jobs. And there were pictures of the contribution of British Forces to the Coalition struggle. These included intelligence gathering aircraft and the training of the local forces in such lethal tasks as mine removal. It struck us that this was a reminder of one of the more recent Princesses of Wales' charities, as well as a reminder of how long the impact of war will last after any victory is declared.

Sunday, 29 November 2015

It is, I suppose somewhat coincidental that, following our visit to the IWM in the old Bethlem building, we should be in its replacement the following week.

We made our way on a grey day to Beckenham, to visit one of the most interesting and remarkable museums of the project so far.The Bethlem Royal Hospital Museum of the Mind is housed in a fine building, opened by Queen Mary in 1930.The handsome staircase is framed by two statues by Cibber made for the gates of the Bethlem in London in around 1676. They show the two forms of mental ill health as defined then: raving, who is chained, and melancholia. These two figures - somewhat shocking to the PC generation, introduced us to what makes this place so remarkable. It is an attempt to explain mental illness in its many forms, partly at least through the medium of the history of treatments.At the top of the stairs is a simple timeline, which told us that the Bethlem Hospital, founded in Bishopsgate in 1247, was by 1403 housing 'insane' people. It moved to a new site in Moorfields, in 1815 to Lambeth, and in 1930 to its present site.

The Office of National Statistics says that in any year, 1 in 4 people in the UK will have mental health problems, and there was a screen with rolling stories, some by current patients and staff and some, voiced by actors, from patients, staff and visitors from the past. By the way, the notorious visiting by the public to gaze at and bait the 'lunatics' ended in 1770, though VIPs and people of influence could still visit.Throughout the Museum, there are paintings by patients, including a number by Louis Wain (1860-1939) whose pictures of cats are well known. His drawing called 'phrenology' introduced a section about this strangest of all (pre-homeopathy!) medical dead ends.A picture which we found very striking was 'Silent Anger' 1993, made by Elise Warner as she received treatment for her eating disorder. Later, there were some drawings of obsessive hand washing as well.One of the things which we found very illuminating, but also shocking, was an interactive screen, where all the synonyms you have ever come across for 'madness' scrolled across: click on any of them, and you got a definition or explanation. So out of bonkers, barking, potty, off his head, etc etc I chose 'doolally', and learned that the transit camp for soldiers awaiting transport home from India was at Deolalli; and the boredom and climate and vermin were enough to send people - well - mad. It was this kind of constant reminder of the stigmas associated with ill health which makes this Museum so thought provoking, in the literal sense.We saw a group of photographs of inmates taken by Henry Hering in the 1850s. Apparently Charles Darwin studied some of these photographs when working on'The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals', though of course the long exposure time required then makes any serious expression of emotion rather improbable.A little empty space with a bench gave time for reflection, and contained a piece of the wall lining of a 'padded cell' with an account of the silence and isolation felt in such a place. It brought us to a section about freedom and constraint, starting with the forcible restraining, chaining and so on of patients. The many empty bottles in the wall here reminded us that people have always tried the pharmaceutical approach as well.The modern version of chaining is, I suppose, sectioning against the patient's will. Here again, we were compelled to think by a brief video and a decision to make. A young woman, whose weight loss has become extreme and life-threatening, is shown talking to a psychiatrist and a mental health specialist practitioner. She is not prepared, or rather not able, to offer a plan which will address her problems before it is too late, and so the question is, should she be put in hospital and treated against her wishes.Next came ECG, with a brief (and for me, pretty unwatchable) bit of film of the treatment being administered, and then some talking heads of practitioners and people who had received the treatment. More enjoyable was an opportunity to listen to people explaining 'talking therapies' like mindfulness, family therapy and congnitive behaviour therapy.There was also a wall of artworks by patients, with an invitation to write our own captions, to remind us how much the words affect the way we look at the picture. The paintings and drawing throughout the Museum are extraordinary.A little album of 'before' and 'after' photographs from the 19th century left us cynically thinking that brushed hair and a nice bonnet made all the difference to appearances of well being: another stereotype of mentally ill people which survives to this day.

We moved across the landing to the Gallery which, at the moment, has an exhibition of work by Richard Dadd. No photography is allowed in the exhibition, but you can see some of his works here. Having studied and shone at the Royal Academy, he went on a long tour of Europe and the Middle East, writing long and informative letters home. But on his return, he heard voices telling his that his father was actually the devil, and therefore murdered him. He spent the remaining 42 years of his life first in the Bethlem Royal Hospital and then in Broadmoor, before dying of tuberculosis. The exhibition includes watercolours from his foreign travels, as well as imaginative and representative works from his later life. The certificates that he designed for the Society for Improving the Condition of the Insane (which handed out certificates and sovereigns to exemplars of good care) are also on display.The Dadd exhibition is on into the new year, and the rest of the Museum is open from Wednesdays to Saturdays. It's 1.6k from Eden park Station, so about 20 minutes walk, if you don't want to take a bus.

Monday, 23 November 2015

Bear with me – in order to keep
the blog going this week, this will be by way of an introduction and overview
for reasons which will become clear. Quite why it has fallen to me to write
this up when both Jo and 63 Regular have worked there and are historians, is
not clear.

When we started this project we
declared (never declare) that we would
report only on the substantive collections, where that was what the
Museum was famous for, and just refer in passing to any special exhibitions.
Well today we visited only for the special exhibitions and did not even finish
them... So I thought I would spend a little time on looking at the building.

The building was originally the third
incarnation of the Bethlem or Bedlam Hospital, a purpose-built institution to ‘look
after’ or ‘keep safe’ the mentally ill of London (though the words used would not
have been that): the now covered Atrium was an outdoor exercise yard for this
Victorian building, the galleries were wards, and the smaller back offices consulting or
treatment rooms. There are stories among IWM staff of a ‘grey lady’ who walks
the galleries at night and of poltergeist-like events in the cinema (formerly
the institution’s theatre), perhaps restless spirits from its earlier use. The
Bethlem as such moved further out into the ‘country’ – West Wickham as it
happens, and you can read more of its history next week…

The Lambeth Road site is now one
of the group of 5 branches of Imperial war Museums – we have already visited
the Churchill war Rooms but have yet to visit HMS Belfast. Duxford and IWM
North lie outside our remit of London. Arguably the Lambeth Road site has the
most memorable and photographic exterior – a large dome originally the chapel
for the Bethlem hospital and an imposing neo-classical portico. The War Museum
was conceived in 1917 (when the eventual outcome of the war was far from
certain) as a way of memorialising the British contribution to the ‘Great’ War –
it became ‘Imperial’ rather than national when the countries of the Empire or Commonwealth
demanded equal billing. It moved into the old Bedlam building in 1936, after
previous incarnations at Crystal Palace and in South Kensington, and has
carried out various projects to make the building better suited to its use as a
museum.

The most recent rebuild was completed
in mid July 2014 to coincide with the marking of the centenary of the start of
the First World War. It retains the central
Atrium to some extent but with a reduced footprint at ground level: this means
there are fewer ‘boys toys’ – tanks, vehicles and the like – though some of
these re-appear rather dramatically on higher levels seemingly hanging over a
precipice. We have yet to explore these various levels. The most recent rebuild
has been partly about improving access – there is yet the issue of the front
steps to overcome but within the main building there are more and larger lifts,
a good bank of lockers and both a book and gift shop, where quite rightly pride
of place is given to good quality reproductions of the Museum’s superb poster collection. The basement houses
banks of toilets also.

The Museum’s remit has
always been to look at conflicts where the British or Commonwealth forces have
played a part and continue to do so; so collecting material is an ongoing process
for this Museum. A small exhibition space
is thus reserved for ‘Cotemporary Conflict’ , a year of displaying items and
material related to the UK role in Afghanistan finished recently and has just
been replaced by something called Fighting Extremes'. This looks at two very different
but in their way rather invisible enemies.

One side focuses on the role of the services helping try to
destroy ISIS strongholds in Iraq, the Army by providing training for Kurdish
fighters, the RAF by direct intervention.
Inevitably the identity of those operational men interviewed is disguised but their
accounts are quite riveting; it says something about the openness of the
services that they are in a position to give interviews, though the cynical
part of me looks on it as a ‘recruitment/PR’ exercise. Less well known perhaps
and just as praiseworthy are the roles of the Royal Engineers in erecting a
field hospital in Kerrytown, MOD scientists from Porton Down in the long fight
to manage and eradicate the spread of Ebola in West Africa, and the RAMC in
treating local health workers who caught the infection. The British contingent
focussed on Sierra Leone (with the US largely in Liberia, the French in Guinea )
and other international teams from China, Canada and South Africa also
contributing . There is an excellent time line, some interviews with
participating scientists who had to set up a lab that was safe and efficient
from scratch and deal with a huge backlog of untested live samples of Ebola;
the nursing and medical staff were in part MOD in part volunteers from the NHS.
As virtually everything from Ebola-infected
premises has to be burnt there is little in the way of artefacts though Will
Pooley’s boots stand out.

The Project

In March 2009, we 'ladies who bus', Linda, Mary and Jo, decided to travel every London bus route from end to end. That project was completed in 2014 and we moved on to visiting every Museum in London. Now we are going back to the buses, to see what has changed in the intervening years.